According to Bloomberg, Google might turn YouTube into a shopping channel. The parent company foresees the internet’s main video platform as a shopping channel of the future, as it’s long being used as a platform for vloggers, content creators, and influencers to promote and sell sponsored products efficiently.
The video site asked some of its creators to use YouTube’s own software to tag and track products that were featured in their videos, linking out to shopping tools generated and hosted by Google. Should any video contain a sponsored product, the goal is to into an online shopping platform. Viewers will watch a clip and can purchase said products directly from YouTube or Google, with the inclusion of Shopify still being tested out.
The new e-commerce platform is currently being tested on just a handful of channels where content creators will have control over what products they decide to list on YouTube.